Thanks to Conservative Economics That Rewards Wealth and Punishes Work US Middle Class is Sliding Toward the Third World

Thanks to Conservative Economics That Rewards Wealth and Punishes Work US Middle Class is Sliding Toward the Third World

A recent article by Les Leopold informed us that our nation is near the bottom of the developed world in median wealth, probably the best gauge for the economic strength of the middle class. The source of the information, the Global Wealth Databook, provides additional evidence of our decline from our once-lofty position as an egalitarian country with opportunities for nearly everyone.

The data is summarized (chart above). Column 4 reveals that the U.S. is near the top of the developed world in average wealth, in good part because of its many millionaires (Col 8). Median wealth per adult, in Column 5, is much lower. As a sign of the distance between America's middle class and its national wealth, Column 6 shows that the ratio of median to mean in the U.S. is lower than in any country except Russia.

The impact of all this is shown in Column 7. Median-level adults in the U.S. get a smaller percentage of their nation's wealth than in any other country except China and India.

To view Column 7 in another way, a middle-class adult in Finland owns $122 for every billion dollars of his or her nation's wealth. In Canada it's $13. In the U.S. it's 60 cents. Only China (40 cents) and India (30 cents) give their middle-class adults less.

America's middle class is sliding out of the developed world and toward third-world status. Column 9 makes it clear. Among all the nations of the world with at least a quarter-million adults, only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon are more unequal in their wealth distribution. Most of the third world countries are, sad to say and hard to believe, fairer to their middle classes than we are.

 Yet the radical anti-American conservative movement is still pushing for trickle-down, screw the middle-class tax and economic policies -  Weirdo Rick Perry and Freaky Ted Cruz Vie for Stupidest Tax Plan

Conservatives Who Think That Women Should Have Fewer Rights Than Men May Cost Republicans Victory, But Save America From A Radical Agenda

Conservatives Who Think That Women Should Have Fewer Rights Than Men May Cost Republicans Victory, But Save America From A Radical Agenda

What if misogyny ends up costing Republicans the Senate? Judging by the polls in the final days before the election, this is not a crazy proposition — especially if “gaffes” on abortion, rape and contraception are equated by the electorate with extremism, repelling even ideologically sympathetic voters.

Just look at Indiana, a state that is choosing between two “pro-life” candidates, one of whom is a Democrat who has voted for House Republicans’ most restrictive legislation on reproductive rights. Still, Joe Donnelly managed to avoid doing what Richard Mourdock did – getting famous for talking insensitively about rape. They’ve been tied or within inches of each other for weeks, but as of today, the first post-rape-comment poll, Mourdock is down 11 points. Meanwhile, Mourdock’s rape-talking fellow traveler in Missouri, Senate candidate Todd Akin, is locked in a race that was never supposed to be competitive, and a cash infusion may come too late to save him. And in Connecticut and Massachusetts, both abortion and contraception have been used to pummel relatively moderate Republicans with the ever-rightward agenda of the national party, and for that reason and more, it’s looking like Democrats will prevail.

This is about more than the so-called gender gap, though women do tend to vote disproportionately to our share in the population and historically favor Democrats. And it’s about more than “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” where, at least as far as those fuzzy words go, the former has a slight edge in polling. When abortion conversations turn to rape, exceptions for which are broadly, if inconsistently, supported by voters, they also suddenly become about a broader callousness and indifference to suffering, one that jibes with messaging about slashing Medicare and Medicaid. Voters drifting away from Mourdock would probably never use the word “misogyny,” but as I’ve said, as the Republican agenda on sex and reproduction gets explained in full, we’re hearing very little about compassion for fetal life and a lot about women having sex.

Pro-choice activists have been saying this for years, but didn’t get much credence until elected Republicans gave a larger platform for marginal and largely discredited views — rape victims can’t get pregnant (Akin); exceptions to save a woman’s life are never needed (Rep. Joe Walsh); consensual sex, and getting pregnant from it, is as shameful as rape (GOP Senate candidate Tom Smith, who hasn’t been able to close the deal in Pennsylvania). The same goes for defunding Planned Parenthood and repealing Obamacare, or at the very least getting rid of the birth control coverage in it — these days, virtually uncontested across Republicans in office or running for it. That may work well in a House race, but it’s proving a tougher sell statewide — and, judging by Romney’s ads soft-pedaling his stances on abortion and contraception, nationally as well.

If you want to know where this all came from or where it’s going, check out Emily Bazelon’s profile of the Americans United for Life president in the New York  Times magazine. AUL has been as influential as any group in crafting the state-level abortion restrictions and rhetoric around them, taking the murky anti-choice rhetoric and mainstreaming it in a palatable and reasonable-sounding way. Yoest “believes that embryos have legal rights and opposes birth control, like the IUD, that she thinks ‘has life-ending properties.’” (She can think that, but it doesn’t make it medically accurate.) She refuses to discuss a study showing that the abortion rate drops dramatically when you make long-acting reversible birth control — like the IUD — free to women who want it, mimicking Obamacare’s full coverage under insurance. And yet she knows that when you talk about birth control and abortion as connected to women’s reproductive and sexual autonomy, the anti-choice side loses. She said as much on PBS, Bazelon notes: ““It’s really a red herring that the abortion lobby likes to bring up by conflating abortion and birth control … Because that would be, frankly, carrying water for the other side to allow them to redefine the issue in that way.”

Instead of outright repealing the 19th Amendment( guaranteeing women the right to vote) and other progressive legislation that have leveled the playing field over the years in one fail swoop, Republicans have been pretty successful in chipping away at the rights of women to be full citizens. And Mittens is no friend to more than have the country. He thinks conservatives and big government should control women,Top 6 Lies Romney Has Told Women in an Election Season Full of Whoppers, Mitt has assembled a binder full of bs on issues that matter to more than half the population

Republicans are resorting to some weird extortion to get the vote, The GOP Will Destroy America If We Reelect Obama, So We Must Let the GOP Win

One Thing Mitt Romney and Republicans Need to Learn; Morality is a Value

One Thing Mitt Romney and Republicans Need to Learn; Morality is a Value

The Washington Post has a blockbuster, must-read story today detailing how Mitt Romney and Bain Capital were “pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States” to countries like India, China, and elsewhere.

ThinkProgress’ Pat Garofalo gets to the heart of it:

    Bain “invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.”

    In one example, Bain was the largest shareholder in a company called Modus Media, which “specialized in helping companies outsource their manufacturing“:

        Modus Media told the SEC it was performing outsource packaging and hardware assembly for IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Computer Corp. The filing disclosed that Modus had operations on four continents, including Asian facilities in Singapore, Taiwan, China and South Korea, and European facilities in Ireland and France, and a center in Australia.[...]

        According to a news release issued by Modus Media in 1997, its expansion of outsourcing services took place in close consultation with Bain. Terry Leahy, Modus’s chairman and chief executive, was quoted in the release as saying he would be “working closely with Bain on strategic expansion.”.

    Other companies that Bain invested in sent jobs all over the world, including to Ireland and Mexico, while Romney has tried to claim that Bain was all about creating jobs and turning around American companies that otherwise would have gone under.

    As one of Romney’s former partners put it,”I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation…The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.” And that’s what Bain did, even if it meant helping companies move operations to the same country Romney now blasts for stealing American jobs.

While the Romney campaign declined to comment for the article, they offered a laughable response today: outsourcing is different than offshoring. In other words, they didn’t dispute one iota of the substance of the story, but instead wanted to split hairs over semantics.

WHY IT MATTERS: While it’s troubling that Mitt Romney amassed a quarter-billion dollar fortune by bankrupting companies, laying off workers, and sending jobs overseas, where his policies would take America is of even greater concern.

Not only did Romney personally profit from the outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs, he has signed a pledge to a Washington lobbyist to protect tax breaks for companies who ship American jobs overseas. Mitt Romney also wants to encourage companies to dodge taxes by simply getting rid of taxes on foreign profits altogether. And he has also eagerly embraced the House Republican budget plan that also protects tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and also abolishes corporate taxes on foreign profits — many of which are “foreign” only because of accounting tricks and other gimmicks.

By contrast, President Obama wants to end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and instead use the money to reward companies who bring jobs back to America. The president also wants to make sure that companies pay their fair share by instituting a global minimum tax to make sure they don’t use tricks and gimmicks to avoid paying what they owe.
Evening Brief: Important Stories That You May Have Missed

A Romney campaign co-chair said that Romney would “rescind” the president’s new immigration policy if he’s elected.

The Montana Republican Party bankrolled an ad attacking the Republican budget because it hurts Medicare.

Why the revelations about Romney’s career as an outsourcer really matter.

Romney has been good at reaping profits for the millionaire elite who invested with Bain. If that is the end all of what constitutes values and love of country, than Mitt is your man. If making a living is a value than Mitt is working against you - and that means most Americans. he even sheltered some of his money is an offshore bank account when taxes in the USA are at their lowest since the 1950s. That is hardly the way a true patriot acts. 

New video shows Scott Brown(R-MA) spoke of meeting with ‘kings and queens’ five times. Brown denies he has said he has meet with kings and queens even though the video is clear. Perhaps brown would be better off and certainly the American people would be better off if this he retired to a sanitarium.

This is what happens when you give a moronic Anti-American lunatic a cable show, Bill O'Reilly Tries To Grasp Complex Argument From Melissa Harris-Perry, Fails